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Links in this episode:
War Zone [21]
Michelle Bachmann's covenant [22]
Dana Perino and Sean Hannity misrepresent abortion and health care [23]
IWF tries to scare you with cancer [24]
North Carolina gives up abstinence-only [25]
Condom education rates going down [26]
Michael Duvall keeps it classy [27]
On this episode of Reality Cast, more coverage of lies and nonsense about health care reform. Also, North Carolina rethinks abstinence-only, and Susie Bright talks about her latest collection of erotic gothic fiction.
This is kinda old, but still super cool, so I'm going to link it. Feministing put up a clip from a documentary called "War Zone", where a woman got a camera and decided to confront men who holler at her on the street, asking them to repeat what they said to her and catching them being embarrassed.
- war zone *
It's hilarious, actually. Men harass women on the street precisely because they know that they'll never be held accountable. But when they are in fact held accountable, they don't know what to do.
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Now that opponents of health care reform have had a whole month to whip themselves into a frenzy of anger, fear, and misunderstanding about health care reform, I'm really expecting the worst when it comes to the bloodbath of a fight in Congress. Because god forbid ordinary working Americans be able to access basic health care, and god forbid people get sick without going bankrupt. But I don't have to guess at how the right wing is going to behave. They're not hiding their intentions in the slightest. On Ed Schultz's Psycho Talk segment, he played Michelle Bachmann making a speech where the blood talk moved further away from being just an expression and inched closer to being literal.
- health care 1 *
I really don't like how Schultz does the high pitched thing, which is sexism and undermines the larger point, which is that Bachmann actually said that right wingers should slit their wrists and become blood brothers in the fight against health care. At this point, the whole thing is overtly tribal. For a long time now, I've been arguing that most of the opposition to health care reform is organized around race-baiting, and less than subtle messages to racists about how they should oppose this because they shouldn't be forced to share with black people, immigrants, and whoever else is on their hate list. But this blood brothers talk raises it to a new level.
And then there's the lies. There's so many out now that it's hard to keep track of them all, but I thought I'd concentrate on ones that explicitly target women's sexual and reproductive health care. Unsurprisingly, this is a focus for conservatives for a couple of reasons. First of all, they just have a lot of practice. Second of all, they think associating female sexuality with health care reform is a good way to stir people's anxiety about women's roles and sex and use that anxiety to turn them against health care reform. It's a sleazy attempt at subconscious politicking, and so no surprise it's the preferred one.
Abortion is at the top of the list. Dana Perino was on Sean Hannity's show, misrepresenting the relationship between abortion and health care reform. That was after showing Claire McCaskil being booed at a town hall event for telling the truth about how the Hyde Amendment prevents federal funding for abortion. That's where they're at now, booing you for telling the truth.
- health care 2 *
Fact Check did not actually say they're wrong. Perino and Hannity are basically lying about this. Fact Check did accurately explain that the proposed public option would not use federal money to cover abortion. It might be covered, but since the public option would be paid for, as insurance companies all are, by premiums paid for by consumers, then it would not be using federal money to cover abortion. There is still no reason to think that taxpayers will pay for abortion. Period. All attempts to suggest otherwise are playing fast and loose with the truth in order to dupe people. If you're absolutely against helping pay into any system that funds abortion, then you have a right to buy insurance from a company that doesn't. In fact, health care reform will make that easier, as you'll have more options to buy insurance under the exchange than you have now, so if hating women and sex is a priority for you, you can seek out insurance just for that reason.
But it's not just abortion that's creating the female sexuality panic response that's being applied to health care.
- health care 3 *
The ad, which is all nonsense of course, is produced by the Independent Women's Forum. The truth is that this woman lived because she had health insurance. And now she's out there trying to make sure that other women don't have that health insurance, so that they die of breast cancer. Health care reform is about making sure more people have health insurance. This is so straightforward that wingnuts have resorted to saying black is white and up is down and having health insurance means you won't.
Why breast cancer? I honestly think that they're more attracted to health care issues regarding women's sex organs and secondary sex characteristics because they know that the panic that women's sexual bodies creates in people can be used to up the general sense of panic. But it's a long shot to suggest that women with cancer will be better off if many of them have no health care at all.
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Insert interview
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From Amplify's blog, I bring good news. Well, sort of good news. The good news is that North Carolina is giving up on abstinence-only sex education. The bad news is that they had to put a lot of kids through a lot of misery in order to get there.
- north Carolina 1 *
And when they say that these rates went up, they went way up. Even I was shocked, and I'm pretty much sold on the idea that if you tell kids not to use condoms, they will react by having sex but not using condoms. In fact, the percentage of students receiving education in condom use in schools went from 50% in 2000 to 39% in 2006. So we shouldn't be shocked to hear this:
- north Carolina 2 *
It's incredibly frustrating that the anti-sex forces are given the benefit of the doubt, and their beliefs about the evils of sex are considered the norm up until we start to see the ugly effects that their beliefs have on the public health. Even without these dreadful stats on teen pregnancy, we should have been able, as a nation, to see the problem with abstinence-until-marriage. The problem is that it's so against most American values. 95% of Americans have sex before they're married. You can't get 95% of Americans to agree there's 26 letters in the English alphabet. Vegetarians are probably a bigger group than people who are virgins on their wedding night, and yet you don't see us bullying schools into teaching that eating meat is wrong and will kill you. So why do we let the tiny virgin minority bully us on this?
They interviewed some youth activists who fought for comprehensive sex education, and the interview really drives home how farcical the whole thing is if you look at it for even a moment with your sanity cap on.
- north Carolina 3 *
Let's think about this for a moment, and really consider how surreal this is. Odds are very good that the teacher telling kids that sex without the benefit of marriage will kill them has herself had sex without being married. It is literally impossible for every teacher selling this message to have been a virgin on their wedding night. Believe me, there are occasional women who claim to be virgins, and even an occasional man, who teach abstinence-only through religious groups, and they go on and on applauding themselves for their virginity. The majority, I'd say vast majority, of teachers using these texts weren't virgins. And yet there they are, alive and able to teach lies. Their very existence undermines the message. No wonder kids tune out.
As they should. The ugly truth of the matter is that not only do the vast majority of Americans have sex before they're married, the vast majority don't regret it, either. Oh, they may regret certain partners or that it was too soon or too late, but if you said, "Don't you wish you'd waited until you were married?", most of us would stare at you as if you'd asked, "Don't you wish that you'd never learned to drive?" It doesn't compute at all. Abstinence-only was only an easy sell because most people didn't think about what it really means to tell kids to wait until marriage. But as soon as they clue in, they don't like abstinence-only anymore.
Of course, they had to give a resident wingnut some airtime to be full of it.
- north Carolina 4 *
You know what? Odds are he didn't wait and he doesn't regret it, either. Anyway, of course proponents will recite the same line over and over, no matter how much evidence you give them that their line is increasing the teenage pregnancy and STD rate. Because this isn't and never was about making kids healthy. He said it right there---it's about the almighty consequences. It's about increasing human suffering, punishing people for sex. I suspect that getting kids to wait, while important to conservatives, is a secondary concern compared to increasing the teenage pregnancy and STD rate. Having people out there suffering is the payoff. Look, they're mostly the law and order conservatives that would put you away for life for shoplifting, and the kind of people who scream at women trying to get reproductive health care at clinics that provide abortion. The idea that someone out there is getting the maximum punishment for defying their stupid rules gets them off, end of story. We need to stop letting them get their hands on kids, who don't deserve lifelong punishment for doing something that 95% of Americans do, and most don't regret.
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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, conservative hypocrites edition. First, here's a description of our hypocrite California Assemblyman Michael Duvall, who represents Orange County.
- duvall *
Yes, he has been caught on open microphones bragging about sex with multiple lobbyists who are not his wife, lobbyists who work for industries he's supposed to regulate. He's not just a little graphic about his sex talk. He even gets into lavish descriptions of the fluids involved. I guess that's consistent with the family values stance against condoms!
Follow Amanda Marcotte on Twitter, @amandamarcotte [28]